Medicine Trails: A Life in Many Worlds

Medicine Trails: A Life in Many Worlds by Salter, John F.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781597141178.

Sometime in 1933, in Northern Californias lush Humboldt County, a Karuk medicine woman named Daisy Jones had a vision identifying the tribes next medicine woman. Later that year, Mavis Smither (McCovey) was born, and in the first twelve years of her life she was groomed by a designated group of medicine women to become a spiritual healer. Medicine Trails is Mavis McCoveys honest and lively account of the many worlds in which she moves: the Indian and white cultural worlds, and the day-to-day and visionary reality of the medicine womans world, as well as trips to what she calls "the other side": one of the responsibilities of a medicine woman is to bring back a medicine mans soul if he gets lost on the trails of the world beyond - a task McCovey has been called upon to do. One of very few first-person accounts of Native American healers, Medicine Trails is invaluable for its insights into the experiences of a modern-day medicine woman. And McCovey is a warm and engaging guide not only to her life, but also her familys history and the history of the Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa peoples of the region.